


revelations

by thessalonike (starblessed)



Series: side effects of coming back from the dead may include... [1]
Category: Julie and The Phantoms (TV 2020)
Genre: Canon Compliant, F/M, Gen, Ghosts Who May No Longer Be Ghosts, Good Parent Ray Molina, Magic, Post-Canon, Resurrection
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-20
Updated: 2021-02-20
Packaged: 2021-03-16 01:21:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,200
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29568138
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/starblessed/pseuds/thessalonike
Summary: When Luke gives himself a papercut and crimson beads up on his thumb, they know something’s up.Julie hasn’t changed at all; it’s the boys, something in the code of their existence gradually being rewritten. Suddenly, they’re not just more present to Julie, but… to the world in general. The basic ghost rules — all the ones Alex learned from his friend Willie and memorized like history notes — no longer apply. The boys can get hurt now; they need to sleep; and sometimes they can even eat.In short, things have just gotten even weirder in the Molina household.( side effects of coming back from the dead may include...1.  you can eat!2.  you can be seen!  ...  sometimes )
Relationships: Alex Mercer & Julie Molina & Luke Patterson & Reggie Peters, Julie Molina & Ray Molina
Series: side effects of coming back from the dead may include... [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2172465
Comments: 15
Kudos: 154





	revelations

**Author's Note:**

> this is a story I’ve wanted to write for ages. It was originally conceived as a long fic, but when I started writing it, they all turned into standalone one shots anyways. so, we get a series! (because i am straight-up incapable of writing a multichapter fic, rip)
> 
> I love the idea of the boys coming back to life because of the power of love and music. Is that where the show’s heading? Who knows. Is it going to happen like this, bit by bit? I mean... probably not. But this is my favorite trope and we love to see it, so — behold, antics.

The night of the Orpheum performance is definitely the start of something… and things never go back to normal after that.

Okay, _normal_ is a big word when you’ve got three dead bandmates living in the garage. Julie’s life hasn’t been normal since the day the guys showed up… but they’d all fallen into a routine, a cycle of predictability in what they were and what they could do. Julie was the only one who could see them, but that didn't mean she could touch them. The boys could only be heard when they played music, and only seen when they played with her. They could touch things, but were mostly intangible. They didn’t need to sleep, they couldn’t eat, couldn’t get hurt or sick. “Basically indestructible”, as Alex put it.

Maybe they took the whole ghost thing for granted.

After the Orpheum show, things are different. Everything changes with that one magical hug... and even though Julie wakes up the next morning, convinced whatever magic surrounded them will have faded, she steps into the studio to immediately be greeted with a high-five from Reggie. Their hands connect; Reggie hoots with victory; Luke immediately rushes over to sweep Julie off her feet in a hug; and from there, everything's different.

Suddenly, touching the boys isn’t a problem. Julie can do it _all the time._ She takes advantage of that fact as much as possible, in little ways and big. Brushing against Luke while they’re writing together... using Alex as a pillow during movie nights... leaning against Reggie while he plays with her hair…

It doesn't feel different at all, really, except it's a completely different life.

Somehow, having the boys tangible makes them feel more real, more permanent fixtures in her life. While it doesn’t change the way she feels about them — they’re her family at this point, were long before they could all hug each other — it’s amazing to be able to _feel_ the guys. Different, but amazing.

Except... that isn’t the only change.

They don’t realize it at the time. It doesn't happen all at once; there's no magical glow, no curses breaking. It happens over a period of weeks, little things that all slowly add up. Luke remarks one day how much easier it is to touch things now — like they don’t have to try at all. Reggie dozes off against Julie’s shoulder, which is strange, because the boys have never needed sleep before; the wet spot of drool he leaves on her shirt sure _feels_ real, and lingers even once the boys have poofed out. Alex’s eyes start watering whenever he’s up in the loft, which prompts Julie to finally give it the spring cleaning she’s been itching to for ages… but his dust allergies haven’t given him any trouble since before dying. 

When Luke gives himself a papercut and crimson beads up on his thumb, they _know_ something’s weird.

Julie hasn’t changed at all; it’s the boys. Something in the code of their existence gradually being rewritten. Suddenly, they’re not just more present to Julie, but… in the world, generally. The basic ghost rules — all the ones Alex learned from his friend Willie and memorized like history notes — no longer apply. It seems like… the more things change, the more alive they become.

Obviously the first thing the guys want to do is _eat._

That's how they end up all crowded into the kitchen at ten-thirty on a school night - the boys giving the fridge a thorough cleaning-out, while Julie watches on, swinging her monster slippers over the edge of the kitchen counter. She's doesn't need to say a word; the boys are all talking over each other, drowning everything else out.

"Ah man, how long's this cheese been in here?"

"Are these anchovies?"

"No, dude, there bock-rones. See?"

"That's _boquerones,_ genius, it's Spanish - probably for anchovies? Right, Julie? Am I right?"

Julie snickers into her cup of tea.

As Luke carefully sets the carton of eggs out of the way, offering Julie a wink as he does so, Alex pulls out an entire box of pizza. Everything about that screams bad idea, but Julie just tilts her head. They won't know if they don't try, right? (Plus, the bigger the mess they make, the more they're going to have to clean up afterwards.)

"No way!" Reggie emerges from the fridge, cradling something like the holy grail. It takes Julie a minute to realize he's found Carlos's secret soda stash - the one Tía is always threatening to root out, because she knows it's there, and he's not allowed to have pure sugar. The same rule should definitely go for Reggie... but he looks so _delighted_ to have found a single Sprite can. Julie doesn't have the heart to break his.

"Okay, okay! Guys, alright - alright!" Reggie spreads his arms, dramatically commanding all the attention in the room. The guys stop what they're doing for just a moment - Luke clutching a whole head of lettuce to his chest - to watch. With great importance, he pops the seal on the can, and lets it fizzle. For a second, he glances around the room - like he's about to backflip off the roof, and wants to make sure someone's filming it - before raising it to his lips. "Here goes nothing."

Reggie chugs.

Even Julie's holding her breath.

And, alright, maybe she's prepared for a giant puddle of soda on the kitchen floor... but, to everyone's amazement, the soda vanishes. Reggie drains the can in a handful of gulps and promptly tosses it aside, the back of his hand pressed to his lips. He looks down, then around - like the soda actually floated off somewhere - before turning back to the others with wide eyes.

"Duuuude," Luke says.

Reggie throws both hands up and _screeches._

Yeah, giving him pure sugar was definitely a bad idea.

The boys are practically bouncing off the counters after that, and the entire kitchen is a flurry of activity - _what should they eat, what do they want to eat, what does it taste like, **Reg, do we even have taste buds** _ \- and it's somewhere in the middle of all that when Julie's dad walks in the room.

He promptly drops his coffee cup.

“Dad!” Julie exclaims, leaping to her feet as the porcelain shatters. In an instant, her heart is in her throat - he's looking at food floating all over the kitchen - but saving their floor is the bigger priority. “Oh man — here, it’s okay, let’s clean it up quick.”

Already, cold coffee is seeping into the cracks between the kitchen tiles, drenching her Dad’s socks. He hasn’t even moved — not good, Julie thinks, but doesn’t question it as she rushes forward. The single napkin in her hands isn’t going to do much, but she drops it into the growing puddle anyways.

“No worries! I gotcha, Ray!” Trust Reggie to always be quick on his feet. He runs behind the counter and grabs a roll of paper towels; by now, he’s got the layout of the Molina drawers and cabinets memorized, always ready to make something appear when it’s needed. Her dad hasn’t lost his keys in a month. Julie tries to shake her head over her Dad’s shoulder, because the last thing her dad needs to see is floating paper towels... but Reggie runs back over anyways.

It takes her too long to realize her Dad isn’t staring at the mess at all.

He’s not even staring at what _should_ be a magical floating roll of paper towels.

No, he’s staring right at Reggie.

Like, dead in the face.

Reggie realizes at the exact same time, and goes shock-still. His eyes widen; his mouth makes a gravity-defying 'o', dropping open like a goldfish. For a second, he just… hovers there, like a balloon filled with helium. If the boys knew how to float, he’d probably be on the ceiling.

“Who are you?” Julie’s dad asks, in a very quiet voice.

Reggie jabs a thumb into his own chest. “Me?”

“You.” Dad blinks at the ghost in front of him, before swiveling towards the fridge, where the two other guys stand frozen. “Them! Who are you, and why are you in my house?”

This is absolutely a valid question, considering it’s eleven o’clock at night, Julie’s in her PJs, and a complete stranger has an entire slice of pizza just… stuffed in his mouth.

For a minute, no one knows _how_ to react. Alex is the one who finally speaks, around a mouthful of pepperoni. “Uhh… Jo’ee’s ‘and?”

“What?” blurt Dad and Reggie at the same time.

“Hi! We're, uhh - yeah, we’re Julie’s band.” Luke bounds forward a single step, following her Dad’s eyes closely. There’s no doubt about it; he’s staring _right at_ the boys, tracking their movements like they’re right in front of him. _Because they are._ Her ghost band is literally right in front of her dad, and her dad can _see them_.

“Whoa,” Julie murmurs.

“Double whoa,” squeaks Reggie. He looks like he might faint on the spot. He’s also vibrating a little bit; maybe from excitement, probably from all the soda.

Her Dad, to his credit, still has absolutely no idea what’s going on, and isn’t pretending to. “Julie’s band who lives in Sweden. The holograms. Your hologram band.” He rotates on coffee-drenched socks, spinning between Luke and Alex at the fridge, Julie on the floor, and Reggie. Julie can see his eyebrows going very tense, slowly coming together the way they do when his brain’s working overtime; Mom always used to joke that’s the face he made when he was about to short-circuit. “Okay. Okay. Julie, what’s your Swedish hologram band doing in our house, in the middle of the night?”

“Uhh.” Julie, for lack of a better idea, panics. “We were… rehearsing?”

“In the middle of the night?”

“Yeah! Time zones, you know?”

“In our kitchen.”

“... great acoustics?”

“In our refrigerator?”

“Better acoustics!”

Reggie might be quick on his feet, but no one ever accused Julie of the same thing.

“Okay,” her Dad says — and just like when Alex starts saying it a dozen times, it probably doesn’t mean anything good. He folds his hands, rubs his brow, and — to his credit — is super calm about the whole thing. “You know, I didn’t realize holograms needed to eat.”

Julie laughs out loud. “Making music — hungry work!”

“Of course, yeah.” Her father crosses his arms. “So why is that boy standing in the middle of the counter?”

Everyone swerves at once to look at Reggie — who, yeah, has vibrated right into the center of the counter. He’s standing there, up to his waist in kitchen tile, staring at her Dad like he’s hung the sun in the sky; only when he realizes everyone else is staring back does it hit him. “Oh. Whoops!"

Reggie phases out of the counter, and promptly bounces on his heels, offering her Dad a grin.

“Sorry about that! Sometimes we get distracted and, you know — just _whoosh,_ right through something.”

“Dude,” Alex says.

“It’s actually pretty weird — you know, we don’t even have to try to touch anything now, but when we’re not thinking about it, sometimes we just walk through stuff without noticing — I've got no idea how ghost rules work, but it’s like, if we see it, we can touch it, but if we don’t see it coming, we’re _going_ to get a tennis ball through the back of the head —“

_“Dude!”_

“C’mon, that only happened once!” 

“And we’re kind of weird _anyways,_ so I dunno how the rules of being dead even work anymore!” Reggie laughs out loud — not in a dismissive way, but in a half-giddy way, like he’s just _so happy_ to be talking. Julie gets it; he’s been talking to her Dad for weeks now, without any hope of a reply. It probably feels like second nature just to ramble at him…

But Reggie _really, really needs to shut up._

She cuts off her frantic ‘cut it out’ gestures when her father turns back towards her once more.

“Julie,” he says. That’s all he needs to say.

“I can totally explain,” says Julie.

Alex chooses that moment to, very slowly, back into the open fridge — phasing straight through it — and close the door behind him.

Julie’s just mad he didn’t take her with him.

* * *

It’s definitely not the way she wanted to have this talk… but once she and her Dad sit down in her bedroom and she finally comes clean, it… goes surprisingly well.

Her Dad leans forward, elbows on his knees, and massages his head like it’s pounding. With everything out in the open — the whole story, from hot dogs to Hollywood Ghost Clubs, and everything in between — he just seems happy not to have gone insane. “I knew it was something!”

Julie draws back, her own eyebrows shooting up. Lifting his head, her Dad chuckles. “Well, I wasn’t actually thinking _ghosts_ , but I knew there was _something_ strange. I work with cameras for a living, _mija!”_

Right. She should’ve thought of that. 

“You’ve never shown a bit of interest in my work, and all of a sudden you’re an expert in holograms? _Por no supuesto._ I tried to figure out how you were doing it, but when even _I_ couldn’t… well.”

Her dad shakes his head again, chuckles dying down. Julie seeks out his hand with her own, and squeezes tight. When he squeezes back, a ball of tension she hadn’t realized had grown in her chest melts away like candle wax.

“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you the truth,” she exhales, before he can say anything else. It needs to be said. “I wanted to, so bad... but…” Her gaze flickers down to their clasped hands. “I was worried you’d send me back to Doctor Turner.”

She’s not looking up at him, but can hear the hurt in his voice when he says, “You thought I wouldn't believe you?”

“Flynn didn’t, when I told her.”

Another chuckle. “Of course Flynn knows. And your brother figured it out on his own, I guess? That’s why he’s been going on and on about ghosts.”

“I still don’t know how he did that.” Julie’s nose crinkles. “But yeah, Carlos… he knows about the guys. _He’s_ never been able to see them before, but… he’s been showing Reggie how to use YouTube, and Alex has been helping him with his geography homework.”

“Reggie…” Her father doesn’t miss a beat. “Counter-kid.”

“Yup.”

“And Alex was holding a bag of my tomatoes?”

“No, that’s, uhh — that’s Luke.” The less said about Luke, the better. “He’s the worst at first impressions. Alex went in the fridge.”

Her father nods, committing faces and names to memory. “Is he, uhh —“ When his gaze flickers back towards the door, he actually looks concerned. “Is he still in there?”

“It’s okay, he can just poof out whenever he wants. I mean, I… I think so.” Suddenly, that doesn’t seem so certain. If all the same ghost rules still apply, sure, but _who knows_ if that’s even the case, when suddenly they can bleed, they can eat, they can be seen —

_“Mija?”_

Julie looks back up at him. Her own crowded thoughts must show on her face, because her Dad leans towards her again, worry knitting his brows.

“We don’t know what’s going on, Dad,” she admits in a small voice. “At first it seemed so simple. Like, they were definitely ghosts, and when we played together they could be seen, but otherwise it was only me! But now —“ Her words cut off; she has to pause to take a breath. When she looks back up at her Dad again, her brows are furrowed, and her chest feels tight. “How can you see them? Why are they different now? Everything’s changing, and I’m not sure what it means.”

When her Dad pulls her into his arms, she feels safe again; he has a way of anchoring her that no one, not even her Mom, could ever compete with. Julie wraps her arms around his waist, and lets him hold her for a moment. When they pull away, her head feels calmer, and things look a bit clearer by the glow of her trusty desk lamp.

“Whatever it is, _mija,_ we’ll work through it together. All of us,” he adds, attention flickering back downstairs.

Julie’s heart lurches. “You — you’re really not upset? At them, at — me?”

“The only thing I’m upset about,” her Dad replies, “is that you didn’t feel like you could tell me. You should never feel like you have to lie to me, Julie. About anything. Especially not something so important to you.”

“I’m sorry,” she says again, meeting his eyes. “I never will again.”

Her dad kisses the stop of her head, and Julie lets out a breath she didn’t realize she was holding.

“Though... I might be a _little_ mad if those boys get into my leftover ravioli.” 

With a tiny laugh, Julie pops back to her feet, and her father follows. “We’d better go stop them, then,” she declares, “before they eat us out of our home!”

Honestly, she’s not sure whether to expect the boys to still be there when they get downstairs. A part of her thinks they’d rather go back to the studio, and wait for things to quiet down; another part, the part that knows them best, isn’t surprised to find all three boys clustered at the kitchen counter. Luke and Reggie are vibrating with suppressed anticipation; they spring to attention when they see her. Alex, sandwiched between his friends — probably to prevent another escape attempt — just looks wary, and a little nauseous.

“We don’t have to worry, guys,” she declares. “Everything’s okay!”

Luke leans forward, rubbing his hands together atop the counter; even from the weird angle, Julie can tell he’s smiling. Alex’s shoulders slump.

“Yes! I knew it would be!” Reggie braces himself against the table, but it’s an obvious struggle for him not to just run straight around and give Julie a hug. He turns to her Dad instead, offering him a crooked grin. “Sorry if I scared you, Ray. We promise, we’re the friendly kind of ghosts!”

Her Dad says nothing.

"Regular Caspers, all of us!"

Her Dad’s silence stretches on... for too long.

Alex is the one to break it. His brows have slowly arched, attention fixed over Julie’s shoulder. “Uhh,” he says, and that’s the point Julie turns, to find her father blinking somewhere over the boys’ head.

“Are they here right now?” he asks, turning to her.

She gapes. “You can’t see them?”

“ _Mija_ , if I saw them, I’d be looking at them.”

“You can’t — can’t hear us?” Reggie looks like he’s just been punched in the chest.

Her Dad’s lack of reply is answer enough.

When Julie turns back to the boys, her eyes are wide; now _she’s_ the one feeling queasy, and it’s not because she ate half a pizza with a ghost stomach. The boys have slumped against the counter, staring at her dad. Their faces are caught somewhere between disbelief and disappointment; it looks a lot like heartbreak.

“Okay,” sighs Alex. “Things just got a lot weirder.”

**Author's Note:**

> Find me on tumblr at [reggieshairflip](https://reggieshairflip.tumblr.com/)!


End file.
